What to Do for your Tutorials

Organising for Tutorials

Please make sure that you contact me before the term begins, possibly even before week 0 in order to organize for a time to meet. If necessary, I will then pair you with another student and give you the list of essay topics and suggested readings.

If you are in your second year, you can either choose to have 4 tutorials this year and 4 tutorials in your final year. Or you can take 8 tutorials during your second year, with one or two revisions sesions in yor last year

If you are in your final year and need 8 tutorials, it is better if they will take place every fortnight during two terms. One extra revision tutorial will be available during week 6 of Trinity Term (advance 'booking' needed).

Handing the essay in

There are two solutions to hand your essays in. Number one (my favorite) is that you send me your essay by email. If you choose this solution, you can hand me your essay one day before the supervision (e.g. Tuesday afternoon if we meet on Wednesday afternoon but Tuesday morning if we meet on Wednesday morning). Number two is that you put your essay in my pigeonhole. If you choose this solution, you will have to hand me your essay more than one day before the supervision (e.g. on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning if we meet on Wednesday afternoon).

I will not correct essays handed in late.

Tutorial

We will meet in my office, room 11, staircase 3, at Balliol College.

Make sure to "prepare" for your supervision:

Keep at least one extra copy of your essay and bring it with you for the supervision.

Re-read your essay before the supervision and be ready to give a short oral summary of what you wrote.

References : where to find them and how to use them

You must read more than one of the works recommended for the essay topic. You should indicate which works you have used in a bibliography, at the end of your essay.

Students often complain that they were unable to read more than one book for the tutorial because the other ones on the reading list were checked out.

This is prompting me to ask everybody to be very considered and try NOT TO BORROW BOOKS FOR MORE THAN ONE DAY at a time and to make photocopies instead.

Although making photocopies is undoubtedly expensive, it might be very beneficial in the long run, especially if you are in your second year and need to study all these topics in two years from now... Then you might have forgotten almost everything... except if you have good handouts and notes from lectures, corrected essays (re-read and annotated after the tutorial) and specific articles, books chapters on hand because by then you might have no time to go to the library ...

Your reading list usually does provide several titles and some of them are available at libraries other than the Taylorian or the Mod. Lg. libraries... Do LOOK for them... Moreover, it is usually easier to find articles in journals rather than whole books because they are more difficult to take out of the libraries (bound in very thick books, too recent to get out of the library, etc.). They are also more up to date and quicker to read. TRY these first.

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This page was last updated on 31 March 2016